Another list of Ubuntu essentials

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials -- time to add some KDE goodness to 'My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration' page...

Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I've noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:


$ sudo lspci|grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]


I have two head monitors working with both the 'ati' and the closed source 'fglrx' drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

xorg.conf-fglrx.20060621 -- works when booting without the second monitor

xorg.conf-ati.20060621 -- when booting with out the second monitor attached, it still thinks it is there. Some windows may pop up on the unreachable monitor.

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

Updated to Wordpress 2.0

As with previous Wordpress upgrades this one was also painless.  My 'Yet Another Daily Delicious' and 'Yet Another Weekly Delicious' continue to work also.
I've not yet restored the style sheet header (this one) or added back some of the other doodads.

Helping my parents into Open Source world

My parents are non-technical people, but they just purchased a nice new HP laptop while out visiting us.

Before they left I set them up with a bunch of new F/L/OSS software,
a TheOpenCD V3.1 disk and free web-based services.

I just sent them list note about what we setup:

---

I installed the following software on the new HP laptop -- they are
all from the CD that went home with you.

• OpenOffice V2.0 -- This is a complete, free replacement for
  Microsoft Office tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It will let
  you open documents that people may send you that those tools.




• GAIM -- free alternative to AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, etc's own version of
  IM or Chat programs. You still need free accounts on those services
  (and you already have them for Google, Yahoo and AOL), but you don't
  need to have 3 different programs running to chat with people on
  each of those IM servers. GAIM connects for your to each of them.
  




• FireFox -- free alternative to using Microsoft Internet Explorer
  (also known as MSIE, the blue E that I removed from at least Dad's
  desktop). MSIE has a history of being plagued by virus, spyware,
  etc. Firefox is not completely immune, but much less of a risk.
  You may hear people refer to Mozilla browser, Firefox is a version
  of that.

There are other free programs on the CD -- it is called TheOpenCD
(http://www.theopencd.org) and you can pass it on or give copies to
your friends -- to look at the other stuff on there to to see if there
is anything interesting to you on it. You can install them on the
office PCs or the desktop PC at home.

I also setup a number of free accounts for both of you.

• Email -- Instead of using Microsoft Outlook and getting your mail
  from Roadrunner or Frontier (which ever you end up choosing for
  email), just get your email from google's free GMAIL service. Use
  any computer and go to http://www.gmail.com/ and log to do your
  email. (Account info below)




• IM -- Dad and I got accounts for IM Chat accounts on AOL (sometimes
  you see it referred to as AIM), Google Talk and Yahoo!. (account
  info below) The GAIM program is all setup for each of those account.
  Just go to the menu Tool s then Account and click 'Online' for your
  accounts. It already has the password information set there. This
  will let you chat with my kids who use AOL, Lori that uses Yahoo!
  and me who actually has accounts on all of them.



• Photos -- You already had an account on Flickr (now part of Yahoo!,
  http://www.flickr.com). You used your old AOL.COM address to create
  an account. and there is a way to change the email address to match
  your Yahoo! account. Dad and I also installed FlickrUploadr and
  there should be a link of the desktop. Double click on it to start
  it and then use the file explorer to drag and drop photos from your
  hard drive (or CD or Camera) to FlickrUploadr. Then press the
  Upload button and the photos will be copied to
  http://www.flickr.com/ where people can see them.
  

Account info that you can pass on to your friends:

• Email
  
  Mom: XXXXYYYYYY@gmail.com
  
  Dad: XXYYYYYY@gmail.com
  
  


• AOL IM (if your friends use AOL pay service or free chat only, which
  my kids use)
  
  Mom: XXXXYYYYYY
  
  Dad: XXYYYYYY
  
  


• Yahoo! IM (which Lori uses)
  
  Mom: XXXXYYYYYY
  
  Dad: XXYYYYYY
  
  



• Google IM (sometimes called Google Talk -- anyone with a google
  email account can IM using the same account info)
  
  Mom: XXXXYYYYYY
  
  Dad: XXYYYYYY
  
  


• Photos -- tell friends to see your public photos here:
  
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/12345678@N00/
  
  There is a way under 'Your Account' to pick a better address,
  similar to what I have:
  
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/
  
  You are currently using a free flickr account. For $25/year you can
  store many many more photos on flickr.com. If you start using
  flickr, that would make a nice start of a xmas gift from us.
  

Various Niagara Falls panoramas

Niagara Falls panorama from Maid of the Mist (6 Photos) (cropped)

Originally uploaded by marcn.




See the other panoramic shots of Niagara Falls and others in my
Panorama Photos photo set on flickr.com.

The free (as in beer), Windows-only app autostitch does an excellent job stitching the photos together. Autostitch works great using the wine emulator on Linux (Ubuntu/Breezy)

ipodder (v2.1) on Ubuntu 'Hoary'

I'd upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu ('Hoary') laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren't in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH


Now clean up a little bit...


$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2


Now, you are all set to start iPodder!



$ (nohup iPodder&) # or add it to a menu bar button



Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro...

- - - - -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don't set the PYTHONPATH:


$ iPodder
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "iPodderGui.py", line 38, in ?
import iPodderWindows
File "/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py", line 4, in ?
import listctrl as listmix
File "/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py", line 296, in ?
EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'PyEventBinder'


People stealing my bandwidth (and no credit to me!)

I was looking through my web logs recently and found a number of people were displaying my images
on their websites. Sure it is a bit flattering that someone liked my photo of our rug was perfect for the background of their blog or thought that embedding a 1M photo I took of John Kerry and Howard Dean in a high traffic web forums [1 | 2] was a good idea. However they sucked up nearly 200M of my monthly bandwidth quota and didn't even give me credit for the photos. You know, I think that may be the worst part.

So this evening I googled around for the magic Apache configuration commands that would prevent
JPG/GIF images from being embedded in someone else's web page. (ie: one not hosted on
nozell.com)

For the record, just pop this in a file named ".htaccess" in the same directory as were the images
are located and it will refuse to let GIF/JPG images to be loaded from other sites.




SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://.*nozell.com/" local_ref=1

<filesmatch ".(gif|jpg)">

Order Allow,Deny

Allow from env=local_ref

</filesmatch>



Read Ken Coar's Preventing Image 'Theft' tutorial for complete details.

Updated Yet Another Daily del.icio.us hack

I've updated my Yet Another Daily del.icio.us (yadd.php) so it can be called once a week. I suppose it should be called Yet Another Weekly del.icio.us... (yawd-1.0.php).

Found through my ping-backs that zman has a patch to yadd.php so it doesn't create empty entries on days where there are no new bookmarks.

Enjoy.

Crucial Firefox extensions

+ del.icio.us plugin -- Add/remove/edit del.icio.us bookmarks from a right mouse click.

* Foxylicious -- grabs your del.icio.us bookmarks and adds them to your local Firefox bookmarks.

* sitebar plugin -- An alternative to del.icio.us. I started running a copy of the SiteBar server on my home Linux box, but it is just simpler to use del.icio.us and for private bookmarks to just keep it locally (internal corporate links, etc)

* webdeveloper plugin -- I don't use it much, but it is handy to find any links within a webpage.

* SwitchProxy tool -- switch proxies as needed. Useful when if you connect to various networks with different proxies settings.

Gross! Gross! Gross!

So this afternoon I saw BoingBoing's article about Larval therapy and just had to blog about my own personal gross-out -- maggots!

Months ago there was a picture of an allegedly maggot infested breast, but that was debunked on Snopes. To exorcise my personal demons, I started hunting for the real thing and found this -- 'Furuncular myiasis of the breast caused by the larvae of the Tumbu fly (Cordylobia anthropophaga)'.

And just what does that mean? Well, here is a better description:

We report a 70 year old woman who presented with a week history of itchy multiple discharging sinuses of the right breast. The sinuses contained wriggling larvae of C. anthropophaga. Fourteen larvae were extracted from the breast and the sinuses healed quite well after the extraction.

Head on over for the photos, but stay for the video.

Man, that is freaking gross! Check out how those suckers wiggle around! Ugh! Unclean! Unclean!

comment spam

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse -- easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I've seen on Jeremy Zawodny's blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer's script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, "what the the color of the sky?" or "3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?"

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me...

IT Conversations and other interesting listening

Yesterday I listened to [Adam Curry's](http://live.curry.com/) Daily Source Code and the Dave Winer collaboration, [Trade Secrets](http://secrets.scripting.com/).

Last night poked around with [ipodder.org](http://www.ipodder.org) and downloaded all the 'stock' content that came with the [get_enclosures.pl](http://www.ipodder.org/) script.

IT Conversations audio is a gold mine! The only problem is not having enough time to listen to everything that interests me.

I don't have an ipod (or an [Apple ipod + HP](http://h10049.www1.hp.com/music/us/en/ipod_flash.html)), but the car does have a CD player, so get_enclosures may need to be hacked to burn a daily CD.

Yet Another DailyDelicious hack for WordPress

I wanted a nice simple way to mirror my daily bookmarks that I've added to [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) into [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)

Stephen Eyre's [dailydelicious](http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt) was close, but
not exactly they way I wanted it. He used the RSS feed, but that doesn't give a good daily cutoff.

So, I present Yet Another Daily Delicious php script: [yadd.php](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/yadd-1.0.TXT).

It asks for just today's bookmarks using the published api, parses the XML, generates nicely formatted HTML and creates a WordPress entry.

Here is the writeup from the code:
- - -


This is yadd.php V1.0 by Marc Nozell (marc@nozell.com) based on
Stephen Eyre's dailydelicious
(http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt)

See http://www.nozell.com/blog/ for the latest version of
'yet another daily delicious' (yadd.php)

USAGE:

1) Edit the section below. At the very least use your del.icio.us
username and password ($del_user/$del_password)

2) Put there file somewhere on the server where you run WordPress.

3) Arrange for this page to be hit once a day, say 11:30ish your
local time. del.icio.us seems to track UTC so depending on which
timezone you live in, some bookmarks from your yesterday may show
up. Consider using a simple cronjob that looks like this:

30 23 * * * $HOME/bin/yadd.sh

where yadd.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
curl http://www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

4) In the morning edit the entry if you wish. I've tried to generate
pretty HTML so it will be simple to edit the entry.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

Anyone that hits the URL for this script will cause your current
bookmarks to be dumped into WordPress. Clearly this is not
desirable.

You have some options. The easiest is to keep this URL 'secret'.
Name it something unusual and put it in a non-obvious place.
Remember that if you display your web hit stats, the url will be
exposed. A better solution to use .htaccess to limit access. If
you do that remember to update the url wget uses to include the
username/password, something like this:
curl http://someuser:somepassword@www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

Enjoy,

-marc


HOWTO migrate from blosxom to wordpress

For my piece of mind, please backup your wordpress database before proceeding. I don't want my instructions to cause you to lose data.

• Grab my mt blosxom flavor files and add to your $datadir. Right-click to save these files:
  content_type.mt date.mt, foot.mt , head.mt, story.mt


• Edit story.mt and change the line "AUTHOR: marc" to whatever
  username you will be using.


• If you are using the blosxom clicktrack plugin (00clicktrack),
  disable it.


• Visit your blosxom site using the mt flavor:
  http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt and save it into a
  file named import in your wp-admin directory. You may want to try
  this: lynx -dump http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt >
  wp-admin/import.txt


• Take a look at the import.txt file you just created. There are some
  things you may want to fix now rather than after the import.
  
  • Lines are wrapped at 79 characters, so long URLs or entry titles may be broken.
  
  
  • If you have a habit of using a bunch of dashes to separate text, the importer
    may get confused and think it is the beginning of a new entry. Consider replacing
    - with =
  
  
  • All the categories will be something like /nh (based on the pathname). You may want
    to remove the leading slash. You can fix this after import and well as build up
    a category hierarchy, so it isn't a big deal.
  
  
  
  



• Follow the standard WordPress instructions for import-mt.php.



• If you don't like your categories named with a leading slash (eg:
  /nh), then edit your new WordPress categories.



• Start going through your posts and clean up any messes...

RSS feed for debian package a day

Andrew Sweger has come up with an cool use for
blog + RSS -- educating people about one GNU/Linux debian package per
day.

I have set up a service that publishes the name and description of
adifferent Debian GNU/Linux package every day. My goal is to
encouragepeople to explore Debian more and discover great software
they might notknow was there (with over ten thousand packages, it's
easy to overlook a few gems). It is implemented using a LiveJournal
free account called "debaday" (sounds Australian to me now). Please
feel free to pass thisinformation on to other groups you think may be
interested.

Anyone can read an HTML version of the current postings at:
http://www.livejournal.com/
users/debaday/

The service is also freely available as as RSS feed at the following
URL:

http://www.livejour
nal.com/users/debaday/data/rss

I've added it to my Amphetadesk feed...

I (heart) MY VAX / VMS FOREVER bumperstickers

There are no
raises at HP this year, so please go
bid on my auction.



width="151" height="92"
src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/i-heart-my-vax-vms-forever.jpg">



Thank you ;-)

New HP 318 Camera

I recently picked up through my company's employee purchase program a nice HP 318 camera. It is only 2.31 megapixel, but it works out of the box with debian (thanks gphoto2 and gtkam!), has a CF slot so with a 256M card it can hold almost 300 pictures at its highest resolution. The kids and I have been going crazy taking pictures of pretty much everything.

Self portrait

The Beast

Picture of our living room rug -- suitable for screen background (click t
o download)

Happy Holidays

An Xmas editorial I really like.

Lotus Agenda is dead, long live Chandler

I had almost forgotten about Lotus Agenda when I saw a pointer to Mitch Kapor's blog where he talks about his new open source project PIM, Chandler, that is 'in the spirit' of Agenda.

Way back in the late 1980s/early 1990s I worked in the then DEC/Digital VMS (now OpenVMS) development group and PCs where first showing up on engineer desktops. Microsoft Word 2.x and Lotus Agenda were pretty much all it was used for. The nice thing about Agenda was you could just dump in random notes and it would semi-automatically index, sort and categorize them. So a "email Rich project functional design doc" would make a todo entry under email, link to Rich's email and also be searchable by 'functional design doc'.

I have hundreds of email messages (RMAIL files read by evolution, mutt and just plain Mail), status reports (in Microsoft Word format as required by my management chain), notes to myself (simple ASCII text), personal and business contacts (Palm Pilot synced to Evolution Address Book as well as the corporate LDAP). To be able to search for all references to "Joe FieldPerson at onsite at BigCompany" would be a godsend.

OSA Foundation mailing lists: http://www.osafoundation.org/mailing_lists.htm